Thursday, September 29, 2005

So, after Mike Brown was ditched as head of FEMA, they brought
him back as a consultant, ostensibly to diagnose what went wrong
in New Orleans. And it was in that capacity that, earlier this week,
he was up before Congress telling them that Louisiana's Governor
Blanco had failed to declare a state of emergency in a timely manner.

Well, if you're reading liberal blogs, you already know he was
lying. (Under oath, no less --- but since he wasn't lying under
oath about a blowjob received by a Democrat, the Republicans who would
otherwise be outraged are giving him a mulligan). But the mainstream
media, applying their usual criteria, realized that no one in power
had told them this was news, and so they didn't report it.

And so, when she testified herself before Congress yesterday,
Governor Blanco was effectively on trial before the public for gross
negligence, whatever the ostensible purpose of the hearing. And she
effectively pleaded
no contest, saying that she was there to talk about job creation.
For which she was praised by the ranking Democrat in
attendance:

"Good for you, Gov. Blanco," [Senator] Baucus said. "This
is not about blame, this is about how we get this job done. I
appreciate your response."

Well, before, there might have been some confusion on the part of,
say, a cub reporter, about whether it was news that Brown was lying.
But now that people in power, on the opposition side no less, have
assured them that there is no news here, the chance that it
might slip into the news anyway, perhaps, as some kind of mistake, has
just about vanished. Which means that there's just about no hope for,
say, the lies about the availability of buses. (Dubya's FEMA turned
away offers of thousands of them from major companies, because they'd
given a politically connected contractor a $100 million contract to
coordinate that. The contractor, when the time came to deliver, was
looking for buses on the Web).

That all doesn't bother the Dims, as the Freepers so aptly refer to
them. As Blanco herself noted, even though Brown has slandered her
right now, she's happy to wait for "the facts [to] speak for themselves
when the time is appropriate." Which would presumably be when the
Republican narrative is firmly established in the public mind, and any
attempt to question it can be dismissed with a curt "get over it."

That was the Dim theory about how to hold Republicans accountable
for their failures in defense about terrorism. Since it worked so
well there, why stop now?

So, Blanco would rather let Brown blame her for his own egregious fuckups than commit the grave sin of "going off topic" --- in response to a direct question from a friendly Senator. I know. I'm fully aware of that. I just think it's pathetic.